"The Cloud" refers to servers that are accessed over the Internet, and the software and databases that run on those servers.
Cloud computing is the delivery of computing services—including servers, storage, databases, networking, software, analytics, and intelligence—over the Internet (“the cloud”) to offer faster innovation, flexible resources, and economies of scale. Organizations of every type, size, and industry are using the cloud for a wide variety of use cases, such as data backup, disaster recovery, email, virtual desktops, software development and testing, big data analytics, and customer-facing web applications.
Benefits of cloud computing
Agility
The cloud gives you easy access to a broad range of technologies so that you can innovate faster and build nearly anything that you can imagine. You can quickly spin up resources as you need them–from infrastructure services, such as compute, storage, and databases, to Internet of Things, machine learning, data lakes and analytics, and much more. You can deploy technology services in a matter of minutes, and get from idea to implementation several orders of magnitude faster than before. This gives you the freedom to experiment, test new ideas to differentiate customer experiences, and transform your business.
Elasticity
With cloud computing, you don’t have to over-provision resources up front to handle peak levels of business activity in the future. Instead, you provision the amount of resources that you actually need. You can scale these resources up or down to instantly grow and shrink capacity as your business needs change.
Cost savings
The cloud allows you to trade fixed expenses (such as data centres and physical servers) for variable expenses, and only pay for IT as you consume it. Plus, the variable expenses are much lower than what you would pay to do it yourself because of the economies of scale.
Deploy globally in minutes
With the cloud, you can expand to new geographic regions and deploy globally in minutes. Cloud service providers have their infrastructure all over the world, so you can deploy your application in multiple physical locations with just a few clicks. Putting applications in closer proximity to end users reduces latency and improves their experience.
Security in Cloud
Cloud security, also known as cloud computing security, is a collection of security measures designed to protect cloud-based infrastructure, applications and data. These measures ensure user and device authentication, data and resource access control, and data privacy protection. The Cloud security systems enforce access controls on employees and anyone who officially has the privilege to access the data. They do this by limiting access to the data they can access to only those who need it. This is also referred to as Identity and Access Management (IAM).
Five Key Areas of Cloud Security --
Identity and Access Management.
Securing Data in the Cloud.
Securing the Operating System.
Protecting the Network Layer.
Managing Security Monitoring, Alerting, Audit Trail, and Incident Response.
Types of Cloud Computing
The three main types of cloud computing include Infrastructure as a Service, Platform as a Service, and Software as a Service. Each type of cloud computing provides different levels of control, flexibility, and management so that you can select the right set of services for your needs.
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) IaaS contains the basic building blocks for cloud IT. It typically provides access to networking features, computers (virtual or on dedicated hardware), and data storage space. IaaS gives you the highest level of flexibility and management control over your IT resources. It is most similar to the existing IT resources with which many IT departments and developers are familiar. Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Compute Engine (GCE), IBM Cloud, Digital Ocean and Oracle Cloud are some examples of IaaS.
Platform as a Service (PaaS) PaaS removes the need for you to manage underlying infrastructure (usually hardware and operating systems), and allows you to focus on the deployment and management of your applications. This helps you be more efficient as you don’t need to worry about resource procurement, capacity planning, software maintenance, patching, or any of the other undifferentiated heavy lifting involved in running your application. AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Windows Azure, Heroku, Google App Engine, SAP Cloud, AWS Lambda, Azure Functions are some examples of PaaS.
Software as a Service (SaaS) SaaS provides you with a complete product that is run and managed by the service provider. In most cases, people referring to SaaS are referring to end-user applications (such as web-based email). With a SaaS offering, you don’t have to think about how the service is maintained or how the underlying infrastructure is managed. You only need to think about how you will use that particular software. Salesforce, SAP concur, Shopify, MailChimp, Dropbox, Hubspot, Google Applications (G Suite) are some examples of SaaS.
Conclusion
In conclusion, cloud computing is recently new technological development that has the potential to have a great impact on the world. It has many benefits that it provides to it users and businesses. For example, some of the benefits that it provides to businesses, is that it reduces operating cost by spending less on maintenance and software upgrades and focus more on the businesses it self. But there are other challenges the cloud computing must overcome. People are very skeptical about whether their data is secure and private. There are no standards or regulations worldwide provided data through cloud computing. Users also worry about who can disclose their data and have ownership of their data. But once, there are standards and set regulations worldwide, cloud computing will revolutionize the future.
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